Monday Mystery Movie: Fight or Flight

"How much more fucked up can it get?"

What should we consider essential in a successful action comedy? That it be funny, yes? Make us laugh? Some of us at least. That the action be engaging, tense, enjoyable to follow along with but not overly predictable? Do we ask that it be particularly smart? Perhaps even contain reasonably fleshed out geo-political critiques, neatly woven into the tapestry of belly-laughs and spraying bodies? Typically, no. It is in fact often accepted, even warranted, that these movies be stupid, particularly stupid. Fight or Flight, a mid-level, multi-studio, ostensibly low-budget action piece from left field, falls somewhere in the Bermuda triangle framed above.

It’s a fair bit stupid—though, as I’ll get to soon, it has its moments—often is dryly, sometimes even darkly funny, and the action sequences are very well covered, if not surprising or original. It’s just now trickling through the corporate quasi-Hollywood grapevine (an alphabet soup of company bumpers plays before the film, which was shot for cheap in Hungary, as many new American films are, pending ludicrous tariff attempts) and is apparently just now reaching the US, as AMC has it on its docket, distributed by Vertical. It lands, limply perhaps, atop a pile of similar films; similarly made rollicking action gaffs full of gags, like Bullet Train, The Gray Man, Love Hurts, and the John Wick movies. It’s a genre that “Hollywood” has managed to keep “alive”; the spunky, stunt-driven revenge escapade, which masks well enough the dearth of classically solid high-octane action like Die Hard, which has mostly vanished. Surely, Fight or Flight will make enough, check some boxes at a number of companies, before being forgotten. In times past it might have found dead space on a cable network, at 3 pm or 1 am, and an unknowing, hardworking dad would’ve lapped it up. But times have changed. It’ll be practically forgotten.

That’s all to say, this is what Fight or Flight can be compared to, against. The dustbin of post-streaming action cinema. My dad would sit down for The Equalizer whenever it came on and nine years later it had the legs (well also Denzel, but still) for a sequel. Hartnett could have had the same! But movies such as this are essentially write-offs, business plans, for a network of mid-sized corporations, as well as decent pay-days for the artists and dreamers that make them. But I think it’s become clear that they aren’t sustainable—are no longer nurtured as a form.

Fight or Flight is more-or-less unabashedly straightforward. It’s tight, mostly, at around ninety minutes, and it gets right to the action. Action like this, knock-em-up hand-to-hand buffoonery, is never boring to follow, especially when the gratuity isn’t needlessly piled on (ahem, John Wick). All of its clever little plot revelations are plunked in competently, without unwanted distraction, even if the levers and logic of the story get muckier the further we get. In a romp this goofy it’s admitted, even desired.

Hartnett is a washed-up nobody drinking himself to death in Bangkok when he’s called by someone from his past, someone we know to be orchestrating some mysterious secret operation against a notorious cyber-terrorist called “Ghost.” She has some leverage on him, this someone from his past, and can pull strings to strong-arm him into becoming an “asset” for her mission. So, he boards a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco with a single goal, capturing Ghost.

Hartnett is great. A blank operative, sleeper agent stereotype, without a blank face. He convincingly adapts to the situation, the kind of “fucked up” he finds himself facing, and whirls through the melee with flippant charisma. Once on the plane the plot needles around constantly. We already know that all hell breaks loose, the film has a cold open that drops us directly into the midst of a chaotic mid-flight showdown, but the how, and why, is what the film tries its hardest to manipulate. Each revelation gums up the works in new ways; somehow everybody on the plane is after Ghost; suddenly a faction of the plane is only after Hartnett; and eventually the Ghost themself, who they are and what they’re doing, is the most decisive switch.

It’s a tight, compressed set-up: a double decker plane full of killers, and an international cyber-terrorist, on a cross-pacific flight. Intentions are kept close to the chest, exposition to a minimum. The CIA, or whatever secretive operation kicks everything off, is double-crossing itself and us, the audience. The irony is all dramatic, and the build up, showing us the layout of the plane, the pilots, the flight attendants, is all done with humor, often with dry, slow moving comedic timing that sometimes gets old but also feels oddly reminiscent of Airplane. Almost every aspect of this movie is mediocre, and successfully so. Once the fighting really gets going it’s quick, punchy, but the camera is always in a good place and the edit makes it digestible. The physicality is far from wholly original but neither is it predictable. The squelchy bits are good—champagne glass to the eye, airplane seatbelt used for choking someone out, a chainsaw coming out of storage. A clarinet wielding assassin tottering out ‘Girl from Ipanema’ before his instrument reveals a knife. Female Shaolin warriors flying across the airplane cabin. Mormons invading the cockpit. “How much more fucked up can it get?” Hartnett asks. A riotous sequence with Hartnett apparently tripping, on…something that makes the brutal close combat morph into delirious dance. The older ladies beside me were cackling.

Things do start to seem interesting, as it gets going. The “Ghost” tells their story, about fighting against the massive tech companies who use child labor, slave labor, in their factories (like Apple). Questions arise when the operation seems to be bungled from the inside, and Hartnett’s own grappling with the moral question of aiding the rich and powerful gets revealed in flashback. Perhaps he too will flip? To the good guys? There is always a sense of justified rebelliousness when the “little guys” are in a desperate struggle for their lives within a mess of other interests, “bigger” interests. When ‘The Clash’ barrelled in at the closing credits there remained a faint scent of it being anti-something, or at least grabbing, snatching at being radical.

The Ghost has some sort of “limitless computer” that will soon be a major threat to the app-oligarchs, and it becomes clear that this is, of course, what the powers that be are after, really. This thingy works as a goofy MacGuffin, it’s not really relevant to anything, not as much as the chainsaw. The social implications of the action in Fight or Flight is far less pertinent than in The Beekeeper, or 6 Underground, which, while both ridiculous, seem to know they are playing with house money.

Of course Fight or Flight is a disappointingly generic glimpse at CIA or secret-op tactics; milque-toast Hollywood suggestions of the unsavory crossover of corporate tech interests and “intelligence” agencies. Anything that might sniff of commentary, or corruption, the dubious ethics of the powerful, is really just that, a scent; it isn’t really implicating anything, anyone. Not as if a typical, vulgar action comedy ever does more than a whiff, a tint, of legible critique.